Archives de catégorie : Literary

LUCIA IN LA-LA-LAND de Tien-Yi Lee, un roman prometteur

Pour son agent américain il s’agit de l’un des meilleurs livres qu’elle n’ait jamais représenté. Pamela Dorman vient d’en acheter les droits nord-américains pour Penguin, et scouts et éditeurs étrangers s’y intéressent déjà :

A brilliant, heart-warming, language- and plot-driven examination of madness, identity, unexpected family ties, and the perpetual friction between love and duty

LUCIA IN LA-LA-LAND
by Tien-Yi Lee
Penguin US, TBA

The novel, told through three different POV’s starts as we see the irrepressible Lucia Bok recently married to her older husband, Yonah, a tough, charismatic Israeli with a glass eye. Together, they live on the Lower East Side. They run an organic grocery store. They think they will live happily ever after but Lucia’s older sister Miranda is wary. When Lucia starts to act a little “off” and ends up in a mental hospital Lucia and Yonah think she just needs some rest. Miranda knows better. Lucia is in fact bipolar and has had an episode before. Lucia needs to be stabilized and put on the right meds, and her husband is enabling her by letting her just come home. But there is nothing Miranda can do. You can’t force a patient to stay in a hospital and even if they stay, you can’t force them to take medication. And so, Lucia returns home, but not for long. When her affliction ramps up again, Lucia decides she wants a baby and since Yonah does not, Lucia disappears.
Enter Manny, an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, who starts to date Lucia. Once she gets pregnant, he is swept into her whirlwind and is blindsided when her illness takes a psychotic turn after the birth of the child. Co-dependent Miranda, having moved far away to Switzerland in an attempt to live her own life, flies back to get Lucia straightened out—if only it were that easy. Attempting a fresh start, Lucia decides she, Manny, and the baby should move to rural Ecuador. But as they plow ahead there, Lucia’s actions spawn unintended consequences for those she loves, and she, like the others in her family, struggle to find balance between self-fulfillment and moral obligation. At its heart, Lucia In La-La Land is the story of a young woman’s quest to have a family, a life, and not be defined by her illness.

Tien-Yi Lee’s work has been published in TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and American Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2012, she was awarded an Artist’s Fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

THE OLD DRIFT, premier roman de Namwali Serpell, sera publié par Crown sous son imprint Hogarth

Namwali Serpell est née en 1980 en Zambie. Elle vient de recevoir pour « The Sack » le Prix littéraire Caine, décerné à la meilleure nouvelle en langue anglaise écrite par un écrivain d’origine africaine. « The Sack » est un extrait de THE OLD DRIFT, dont le manuscrit complet devrait être disponible sous 18 mois. Le talent de Namwali Serpell n’a manqué d’être immédiatement remarqué par le Guardian et la BBC.

The Great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for, written by one of the most exciting new African writers

THE OLD DRIFT
by Namwali Serpell
Hogarth, Late 2017/Early 2018

THE OLD DRIFT is a vast and ambitious, episodic narrative about a curse that affects three generations, that takes us from Livingstone’s ‘discovery’ of Victoria Falls in 1855, through the foundation of Northern Rhodesia, its transformation into Zambia, the Zambian Space Program of the 1960s (with astronauts called Afronauts), to the southern Africa of 2050.   It is broken into three parts, narrating The Grandmothers, The Mothers and the Children of one family, playing with and subverting classic fiction tropes, including magical realism, and even science fiction.

Namwali arrives with a tremendous amount of acclaim:  her first published story was selected for the Best American Short Stories; she was just awarded the Caine Prize; she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award; and was chosen to be one of the Africa39, representing the 39 best African born writers under 40 working in the world.  She was awarded a Bread Loaf Tuition Scholarship this year. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, n+1, McSweeney’s, Bidoun, Callaloo, The L.A. Review of Books, The SF Chronicle, and The Guardian.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN de Parnaz Foroutan

If your child is your legacy, who are you without one? What story will you leave behind?
A wrenching and heartfelt debut novel

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN
by Parnaz Foroutan
Ecco, Fall 2015

Set in the Iranian town of Kermanshah at the turn of the twentieth century, THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN is the intimate, poetic, and brutal story of a young woman beholden to the schemes and strictures of a male world. In a cloistered household of wealthy Jewish merchants, at a time when a woman’s worth is measured only by the number of male heirs she can produce, Rakhel, a barren young bride, must do the impossible: produce a son and satisfy her husband Asher’s wild desire for preeminence. Their struggle slowly rends their family asunder, dividing Asher from his family and breaking the delicate bonds between the women of the house, which have grown like flowers in a garden as they battle impossible odds to save Rakhel and her place in the household.

THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN’s lyrical prose and heartbreaking evocation of female struggle in a forgotten time and place is reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, but it is not just a novel about women. It is a story of Iran, of a lost cultural moment and identity that flourished before the wars and the reign of the shahs. And it is a story about family—about the things that draw us closer and perhaps inevitably push us apart.

Parnaz Foroutan was born in Iran and spent her early childhood there. This novel, for which she received PEN USA’s Emerging Voices fellowship, was inspired by her family history. She has been named to the Hedgebrook Fellowship and residency, and has received funding from the Elizabeth George Foundation, among other institutions. Writers like Holly Morris, Gloria Steinem, and Carolyn Forche have reviewed her work with praise and hold the project in high esteem.

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES de Karen Joy Fowler en lice pour le Man Booker Price

Après avoir remporté le prix FAULKNER/PEN, le dixième roman de Karen Joy Fowler a été sélectionné pour le Man Booker Prize 2014.

Les droits de ce bestseller ont été déjà acquis par Putnam/Marian Wood Books (États-Unis); Serpent’s Tail (Royaume Uni); Goldmann (Allemagne); Kinneret (Israël); Albatros (République Tchèque); Aylak Kitap (Turquie); Ponte alle Grazie (Italie); La Magrana (Espagne-langue catalane); Soft Press (Bulgarie).

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES
by Karen Joy Fowler
Putnam, May 2013

“A gripping and surreptitiously intelligent book about a family’s falling apart after a young daughter is sent away… The book is far deeper and more ambitious, however, than its central conceit would lead one to think.” – Khaled Hosseini

“A novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get… [T]his is a story of Everyfamily in which loss engraves relationships, truth is a soulful stalker and coming-of-age means facing down the mirror, recognizing the shape-shifting notion of self.” – Barbara Kingsolver, front page of The New York Times Book Review

“It really is a magnificent piece of work. My greatest joy has been handing it to people and telling them they have to read it. They keep coming back to tell me how much they loved it.” – Ann Patchett

“Read this goddamn book.” – Gawker

“Fowler’s novel is superb….Fowler’s smart and exquisitely sad novel provokes us to think about a lot of aspects of our relationship to animals that most of us would rather ignore.  – Maureen Corrigan, National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air”

“A strong, unsettling novel . . . Fowler explores the depths of human emotions and delivers a tragic love story that captures our hearts.” – Library Journal (starred review!)

Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind.
Now her adored older brother is a fugitive, wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. And her once lively mother is a shell of her former self, her clever and imperious father now a distant, brooding man.
And Fern, Rosemary’s beloved sister, her accomplice in all their childhood mischief? Fern’s is a fate the family, in all their innocence, could never have imagined.